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Setup
To play, you'll obviously need ships on a smaller-than-minifig scale. Personally, I try to imagine that a brick is 25 feet across and a plate is 10 feet high. This is, of course, an ideal - any microscale builder will tell you that the elements available leave scale a fairly fluid concept. For ease of play, it would help to have larger weapons and defense systems built into the ships so that attack angles and whether or not a system is a valid target are more clear during play. I like to have my ships on stands, which has the added benefit of giving an easy point of reference during movement. To measure out movement and range, it wouldn't hurt to have a ruler for each player - I made mine out of 2xX plates and 2x4 bricks in various colors. If your ships are on a different scale, smaller or larger bricks may be appropriate to use as the game's unit size. The only dice you'll need are standard 6-sided cubes like you'd find in any board game - some kind of container to roll them in would be handy. During the course of these rules, you'll often see these referred to as Xd6 - the 6 refers to how many sides the die has, and the X indicates how many of these dice should be rolled. Besides your ships, make sure you have something to represent your drones, missiles, and fighters your ships may be launching. To note reloading status and when various abilities become available, I suggest multicolored plates of some sort - these can clip to the stand to indicate cooldown time. A play area with some sort of marked border is necessary - 2 feet by 2 feet would be what I'd consider the minimum useful play area. You'll also need some sort of sheet - either brick-built, paper, or electronic - for keeping track of ships' equipment, damage, and other relevant information. At the beginning of play (and, if you like, at agreed-upon intervals thereafter,) roll a die to determine initiative. Winning initiative means you get to pick if you would like to go first, last, or before/after someone in particular. The person that came the closest to winning after you does the same, and so on down the order. While it can be helpful to be the first to pull the trigger, there is also an advantage to being later in the order - this allows you to respond to developments during that round. If the fleets involved are large enough, it may be prudent to denote groups of ships to be moved together in sub-rounds. If this is done, the player order is followed as it was originally determined, but each player only moves one group on each sub-round rather than their entire fleet. If players have an uneven number of groups, then players with fewer groups will simply be skipped later in the round. It does not matter in which order groups are moved, so long as each group is moved once and only once per round. Category:Rules